As far back as I have memory (and I'm told before as well) my family had Macs in the house; our LC575 and Powerbook 150 were staples of my childhood. I remembe

As far back as I have memory (and I'm told before as well) my family had Macs in the house; our LC575 and Powerbook 150 were staples of my childhood. I remember one day when I was in my dad's office after school, sitting at his PowerMac 6100/60 ( this would have been about 1998, with me being 8). He was running SoftWindows emulating a 286 running Win3.1, something foreign to me. He showed me around this mysterious "Windows" thing (which wasn't too interesting to me) and then showed me what happened when you quit windows and went into "DOS". A few looks at cd and dir and I was enthralled. Pre-teen years spend with a string of cast-off 486s and old Macs (and that critically timed slackware 7.1 disc) gave me things to meddle with. Not having broadband Internet until 2007 taught me to delve deep into whatever i had access to, not able to fall prey to flash games and other time wasters. Basically, being pompous enough to think that I could meddle with things beyond my young age fostered that crucial skill of "I might not know off the top of my head, but I know how it probably works, and I can find out exactly how it works"